Things to Look for in Your Google Analytics Report

Guest post by David Smith

Majority of the bloggers use Google Analytics to track their traffic but very few of them actually realize the true potential of Google Analytics and how they can use it to find useful information about their audiences. This article will cover some of most common and few not so commonly used features of Google Analytics and how bloggers can use them to learn more about your audiences.

Content by Title

The “Content By title” feature under content tab shows you the most popular posts of your blog. It will help you to understand what kind of Titles/posts can easily attracts the attention of your target audience. Do they like the lists titles like (5 things to do X) or Opinionated kind of titles (What will you do in Situation X) . The other thing you need to see in this report is to find out which titles have a high or low bounce rate. It will tell you that though the title is attracting visitors, but the visitors didn’t get the information they were looking for and what you need to improve.

Content Drilldown, Top Landing and Exit Pages

As the name suggests, Content Drilldown gives you the stats of all pages of your website. Similarly top landing pages and Top exit pages in a way tells you the pages on which most of your user lands and the pages which leads visitors to leave your site. Now, you may see the top landing pages are only the top exit pages. If that is the scenario, it means that the pages you are doing link building for (so that most of the traffic lands on it) are not appropriate or can’t provide the information visitors are looking for and need serious modifications.

In-Page Analytics

In-page analytics is a new feature in Google Analytics that tells you how visitors see your blog. Which links they click the post. How many of them read till the end. How many of them can actually see your “subscribe to our blog” button. How many of them are clicking on ads. Which AD spots get most clicks? All these questions which almost every blogger has in their minds can be answered by this feature of Google Analytics. To learn more about this feature, check this post from Google here.

Find the keywords that need immediate attention

If you have ever sorted a report in your Analytics by “bounce rate” then you must have noticed that almost all keywords in top entries have 100% bounce rate and only 1 visit. Most of the times, this data is of no use. But Google recently launched “Weighted Sort Algorithm” will show you the keywords (high visits and high bounce rate) which need your immediate attention.

Traffic Segmentation by Source

As a blogger, you must know how much traffic you are getting from different sources – social media, email marketing , search engines and how this traffic is behaving ( in terms of pages/visit , bounce rate , time on site etc) . To get all this information, you need to segment your traffic according to various sources. To learn more on how to create a segment, click here. After that select “source” tab under “traffic source” dimension and then add social media sites in value field.

Visitors Segmentation by Device

According to Technocraiti state of blogosphere report 2010, 25% of bloggers are already using mobile devices and Smartphone for blogging and this number will increase in near future. Now what does that mean? It means that your blog should be mobile browser friendly, your posts should be short so that it can be easily read by mobile browsers and so on.

I won’t be able to cover all the features of Advanced Segmentation here , but Since it is a very powerful feature of Google Analytics and you can get every information you may need by this feature, I’ll recommend you to read the complete tutorial here and to play with it.

Of course, there are plenty of other features which I was not able to cover but I’ve tried to cover few important features which according to me every blogger should use. Traffic analysis is important. You can’t improve your blog without seeing how your traffic is behaving.

And Finally, Do not take Google Analytics as granted just because it is free. This tool has lots of features (even more than few of the paid ones) and how you use them depends on your own creativity. Would you like to add some more features to the list? Feel free to share them with us in comments below.

This is a guest post by David Smith who works for Conversion Optimization Company Invesp and enjoys writing on SEO, landing pages, conversion rate optimization and affiliate marketing.

Raju PP Founder-Editor Raju is the founder-editor of Technology Personalized. A proud geek and an Internet freak, who is also a social networking enthusiast. You can follow him on Facebook and on Twitter. Mail Raju PP. Follow rajupp